Access to all articles, new health classes, discounts in our store, and more!
Recent Conclusions in Malnutrition
Presented at the American Naprapathic Association Convention, Hotel LaSalle, Chicago, Illinois, June 1943. Published in The Challenge Magazine, 1943.
* * *
Dr. Thomas Parran, Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service, at the Hot Springs United Nations Food Conference, has just commented that improved nutritional standards would “add ten years to the virile life span of the average human being.” That is probably an understatement; I have always made it twenty years. But men in Dr. Parran’s position must lean to conservatism.
Whether it is ten years or twenty, it is a terrible indictment of American intelligence and initiative for our state of nutrition to be discovered in this position. The economic loss of this productive man power alone means half as much annually as the annual cost of our participation in the World War. It is a staggering sum, calculated in dollars, even to those conditioned to the astronomical figures of modern finance. It would, in one year, have built a comfortable modern home for each and every man who was unemployed in this country in 1933.
We have drifted into this deplorable position of national malnutrition quite inadvertently. It is the result of scientific research with the objective of finding the best ways to create foods that are non-perishable, that can be made by mass production methods in central factories, and distributed so cheaply that they can sweep all local competition from the market. Then, after there develops a suspicion that these “foods” are inadequate to support life, modern advertising science steps in to propagandize the people into believing that there is nothing wrong with them, that they are products of scientific research intended to afford a food that is the last word in nutritive value, and the confused public is totally unable to arrive at any conclusion of fact, and continues to blindly buy the rubbish that is killing them off years ahead of their time.
Until sixty years ago, bread was made from locally ground wheat. The milling industry became centralized, mass production methods were instituted, bleaching was invented to improve keeping qualities of flour, and the downhill trend of public health began that would have been far more obvious had not medical discoveries and improvements in sanitary science offset in considerable degree the otherwise astonishing increase in death rates from diseases now attributed to mineral and vitamin deficiency. Most of the ills of the human race are either in the class of the degenerative or infectious diseases. So we can easily see why Dr. Parran arrives at his conclusion.
If the American people were confronted with a war with a foreign enemy, so powerful in a military sense that it could slaughter two million people a year, it would be a major and primary national problem to lick such an enemy with all possible haste. But malnutrition can kill this number yearly, and modern advertising science, with the volunteered assistance of modern organized medicine, works hand in hand to keep the people in the dark and keep the dollars flowing into the coffers of the makers of devitalized, “foodless,” foods.
In Canada, an honest and conscientious administration has obtained the passage of a law prohibiting the adulteration of wheat flour or bread with any synthetic substance in recognition of Investigations that have shown such mixtures were definitely more harmful than the flour was before enrichment. In this country, however, the advertising propaganda power of the chemical industries is so influential that the American people have been humbugged again, and are eating this new rubbish with the same gusto that they have been exhibiting for forty years for digging their graves with their teeth.
The Canadian law says that if a high-vitamin bread is to be sold, it must contain the original vitamins of the wheat and not an imitation. In this country, the people are fooled by the advertising propaganda; but the bugs that can only live in high-vitamin flour still leave the enriched flour alone, for they have not had the opportunity to read the advertising.
Enriched flour is so-called because a few synthetic factors are added to replace several times as many natural factors. This serves to aggravate the effects of deficiency of those factors not added. The most important result of this aggravation is the development of liver disease that arises from the lack of the lipocaic group of the B complex. The patient develops allergies, angina pectoris, arteriosclerosis, diabetes, or gall bladder disease; and in the dog-feeding tests on enriched flour, the animals had the tendency of becoming senile in deportment and dropping dead suddenly in their tracks, just as the middle-aged business man often dies, as reported daily in the papers.
I may appear to be overly radical in my remarks, but I should certainly be a Casper Milquetoast if I failed to make my point here, when the conservative statement made by Dr. Parran must be interpreted to mean that two and a half million people a year die ten years too soon from malnutrition itself. If the truth itself is radical and hard to believe, it is not a circumstance of my making. And there can be no doubt of the truth. It is becoming more apparent every day.
The really serious part of the picture is that those who are charged officially with the job of enforcing the regulations regarding the truthfulness of advertising and labeling are under such political and commercial control that they are actually stopping the advertising of vitamins and mineral foods, and factual statements as to their effects are not permitted to be made in advertising and labeling unless they conform to the “consensus of medical opinion,” while simultaneously the labeling and advertising of foods that fail to supply nutrition are blatantly setting forth such misstatements as, “White bread is wholesome”, and that “Synthetic vitamins are the same as the natural.”
As to the status of synthetic vitamins, it is exactly the same as that of any synthetic food; they are dangerous. Any thinking person would certainly look askance at any synthetic imitation of a natural food. Dr. Casimir Funk, who originally discovered the method for concentrating vitamin B and invented the word “vitamine,” to describe it, says that the “synthetic product is less effective and more toxic.” The same opinion is held by any physician who has tried both synthetic and natural products.
If you have any doubt as to the possibility of synthetic vitamins being dangerous, read the report on the tests of the effects of vitamin D as compared with the natural in 500 human pregnancy cases. All the cases given the synthetic product with calcium had definitely calcified and diseased kidneys, shown by X-ray examination, while those given the natural product had no observable change in the kidneys whatever. This is reported in Dr. Weston A. Price’s book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration.
What are the effects in general of these devitalized foods?
First, is the degenerative changes that end in the sudden or gradual death of the victim, usually put in the category of heart disease, high blood pressure, and probably cancer.
Second, is the lowered resistance that shortens the life span and permits the continual attacks of disease germs of the various kinds that may be anything from pyorrhea to pneumonia.
Third, is the fatigability that is characteristic of the deficient person which steals his living hours and makes his life miserable and nonproductive, instead of happy and prosperous.
Fourth, and last, is the degeneration of sex function of both sexes, that is actually and definitely bringing on what Theodore Roosevelt termed “Race Suicide.” We, as a nation, are being unquestionably castrated, little by little, through our use of foods that have been tampered with–let us say, denatured and devitalized. Therefore, we, ourselves, become devitalized. The deficiency of every vitamin has some part to play; there is no special sex vitamin. The female of the species pays the biggest penalty for our ignorance.
Now, the last question is–how can we avoid these deficiencies?
We must first select our foods with meticulous care. Eat no refined sugar or white flour, or products containing them. Use honey, brown sugar, and maple syrup only, as sweets. Use fresh ground wheat or other cereals exclusively, as the vitamins in wheat or other grains become oxidized in a few days and freshness is the only guard to wholesomeness. The flavor of whole wheat changes day by day after grinding, like coffee. The finer it is ground, the faster the loss of vitamins. Many people find the answer in a home grinder that can often be obtained at a low cost from department stores.
Use only real butter–avoid oleo. For cooking, use peanut or corn oil, if possible. Pasteurized milk is relatively useless as a source of the calcium it is so well recommended for, because pasteurization destroys the enzymes that are necessary for the assimilation of the calcium; so insist on raw certified milk exclusively.
Citrus fruits are not dependable sources of vitamin C unless fresh. Oranges may be devoid of this vitamin if more than three months old. They are now stored in air-conditioned warehouses for three times that time, in many cases, without obvious alteration in texture. Leafy vegetables can lose all their vitamin C in one week of storage, so your only dependable source of such foods is the roadside farmer or your own garden.
Meat, today, is carried in cold storage until its vitamin content is only a vestige of its original value, so fresh fowl and fish are the best from a vitamin standpoint.
If you have children to feed, whole wheat as pancakes, with honey, or whole wheat cereal made by cracking wheat in a home hand grinder should be a basic food for the morning meal. Peanut products, fresh roasted or as peanut butter, are a basic high-protein food that can substitute for meat in these days, in diets for children.
The British Army, when Wellington licked Napoleon, was fed a ration of one pound of wheat daily per man. It had never had a healthier record. No other food was issued; the man who got tired of wheat could find a civilian to trade with for something else. He had his choice of making it into bread, eating it raw, or as a cereal.
Potatoes, like wheat, can support human life indefinitely, if eaten boiled but not mashed. Mashing exposes the vitamin C to air, causing its destruction in ten minutes. Potatoes have about one-third of the vitamin C content of oranges and are a valuable source of that vitamin. Tests in Irish prisons have shown that men fed potatoes alone for ninety days gained weight and were apparently in better condition than when they began. Bananas, too, can be used as a single food, containing everything needed by the human economy.
So, we can list as basic dependable foods–milk, wheat, potatoes, bananas. Each will support human life alone, if not devitalized by tampering in the hands of middlemen. Fresh meat will also stand in this category, too, as proved by Steffansson.
Children will overeat of carbohydrate foods if given the opportunity to have access to devitalized products. Candy made with refined sugar is not self-limiting to the human appetite like the natural honey. That is why sugar can cause such destruction to health, for it fills the stomach without affording complete nutrition. It is far cheaper in the end to buy the higher priced wholesome foods than to pay the doctor and dentist for services after the damage is done.